Apropos of nothing, this is a project I started some time ago. Due to the community’s lack of interest and financial support, I kind of stopped working on it. Sharing it again just to test the waters - if there’s enough interest, I might feel motivated to work on it again. (Issues and PRs welcome!)

codeberg.org/IDEmacs/IDEmacs

IDEmacs aims to be a set of #Emacs configurations which provide an out-of-the-box experience similar (if not identical) to popular GUI IDEs and editors.

It is aimed at…

1. Programmers coming to Emacs from other IDEs, or even first-time programmers familiar with only office applications.
2. Beginner #CommonLisp and #Scheme programmers, who need the functionality of Emacs (Sly/Geiser + structural editing) without having to perform unnecessary setup and without dealing with an alien style of keybindings. In other words, similar to Portacle or Guile Studio.
3. Non-programmers who want a fully-featured #Org, #Markdown, or #LaTeX editor with idiomatic shortcuts and mouse-friendly GUI.

It aims to provide…

1. GUI and mouse support, in addition to a keyboard-driven interface.
   
   • Unlike most starter kits, we do not hide GUI elements by default.
   • We support configuration via the custom GUI, not just Elisp
   • If resources allow, we may implement new GUIs in Emacs

   
   

2. Keybindings that follow popular GUI and IDE conventions.
   
   • CUA mode is just the start - much more keybinding configuration is needed to provide an unsurprising experince. And that’s before we even get to the IDE-specific keybindings.
   • This excludes starter kits that use Evil by default, such as Spacemacs or Doom.

   
   

3. A fully-featured, fast, and configuration-free Emacs experience, like any starter kit/distro.
   
   • The configuration uses idiomatic Elisp and contains a generous amount of comments, valuable to anyone interested in learning to configure Emacs using Elisp.

   
   

Perfectly imitating the GUIs and subtle behaviour differences of IDEs is desirable, but not top priority. Given our limited resources, we aim for “good enough”.

We hope this gives new users a comfortable starting point, and make them more likely to stick around to discover the possibilities of Emacs’ malleability, rather than being driven off by the default experience.

#contraCodes #Lisp #EmacsLisp